Many applications allow for dynamic, asynchronous data transfer, using multiple communication protocols and a variety of servers. Often, such applications gather data from distributed, heterogeneous sources. Clients having client-side functionality often also have server-side components, which may need additional processing before the server sends the data back to the client over a network. This separation of components over the network can cause latency that may affect the overall performance of an application that is executing on the network. Understanding the elements which contribute to this latency is important for developing and maintaining applications that must meet certain performance requirements.